Try look at the youtuber sciguy14 and one of his most recent videos is of the competition he entered where he interfaced arduino with python to get data off Facebook. There is example code from both.There are two videos that have the source code, both has the name Facebook hackathon.

Where X is the number of bytes you want to read together. If you just write read = ser.read(), you read 1 byte.

I recommend you to read just one byte at a time because if you read more than one, it will kept as string and you cannot modify it. For avoiding it and be able to modify you have to save it as list but I haven't the code here right now.